The Election Wasn’t Stolen

Mark of New Jersey

Mark is a Founding Editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the predecessor of Ordinary Times.

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60 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    New rule: Both sides need to shut the hell up about “Stolen Elections”. If you don’t have actual evidence of fraud, if all you have are some possible statistical anomalies that have perfectly legitimate alternative explanations, or they are only anomalies because you suck at math, or don’t understand how Stats work, then you have squat, and any claims otherwise are just shite-stirring or trolling or whining because you don’t like the results.Report

  2. Thank you. I don’t think people realize:

    1) How spread out our elections are. We have thousands of precincts and its’ really hard to coordinate this sort of thing. Even sans voter ID, if I walk into a district and say “Hey, I’m Jonny Jones, I’d like to vote”, I run the risk that (a) someone there knows Johnny Jones; (b) Johnny Jones has not already voted. I’m risking a serious felony charge for …. 1 vote.

    2) One of the reasons the counting was slow was because of all the safeguards against fraud. In PA, the ballots are scanned into a computer, checked against the registry,, then opened up, then sent to another group, they open the privacy envelopes and then they start tabulating. All in front of observers from both parties.

    It’s ridiculous. Small fraud can happen. Fraud on this scale? No.Report

    • George Turner in reply to Michael Siegel says:

      2) That’s crazy. There are no safeguards against fraud in Pennsylvania or they would have rejected some ballots.

      Year: Mail-in-Ballots : Rejected : Reject rate
      2016 266,208 2,534 0.9519%
      2020 2,614,011 951 0.0364%

      At the 2016 rejection rate, we would expect 24,882 rejected ballots, not 951. These numbers say that either the average voter IQ in Pennsylvania is suddenly 180, or election workers aren’t checking ballots by standards required under Pennsylvania law.

      Second, Pennsylvania hasn’t allowed Republicans to observe the process. They are kept behind a fence, 20 feet away from the closest desk (in theory now reduced to 6 feet), while remaining hundreds of feet away from the other desks.

      The ONLY reason to lock-out observers from the other party is to commit fraud. The only reason.Report

      • Em Carpenter in reply to George Turner says:

        They were NOT locked out.
        And what do you mean “the other party”? Is the vote counting done only by Democrats? Are Dem observers given an up-close advantage the Republicans are denied?
        You make no sense.
        You also don’t need a 180 IQ to fill out a ballot, and the rejection rate may be higher anyway after all is said and done.Report

        • George Turner in reply to Em Carpenter says:

          In one county they were physically removed. In Philly the Republicans had to get a court order to let their observers in, and then the Sheriff refused to enforce the judge’s order. Courts do not like it when you ignore their orders.

          Democrats don’t need observers because they’re the ones committing all the fraud. The Democrat “observers” just have to be aware enough not to directly witness it *wink wink*. Notice that these crazy vote counts are only coming from cities or counties that are controlled by a Democrat machine from top to bottom, and where nearly everyone votes Democrat (in theory). It is likely that there isn’t a single Republican among the election workers who are processing the ballots.

          Remember Florida 2000 when you’d see a recount worker staring at a ballot, with two observers looking over his shoulders? We have nothing like that this time. One of the Republican election observers in Philadelphia was using a pair of binoculars to try and see what was going on. Now under what standard, even in Africa, would that past muster as a “free and fair” process? That’s third world dictatorship levels of election procedures.

          These “closed door” operations are only happening in heavily Democrat cities with long histories of voter fraud, and complete Democrat control over the election results. These also happen to be the areas that keep finding new ballots, and keep having “pauses” in their counting, and keep dragging things out until they’re ahead. There are all just patent signs of egregious election fraud in any country that the UN monitors.

          In counties or cities that are more evenly divided, we’re not seeing all this suspicious activity, nor are we seeing evidence of ongoing hijinks. That’s because in a room full of people from both parties, everybody can see what the other side is doing, and nobody tries anything that’s blatant. A ballot here and there isn’t the problem. It’s the boxes of 10,000 ballots that are delivered when the election workers are sent home for a few hours. Or places where they’re all busily working with no close supervision at all.

          As for the rejections in Pennsylvania, the rejection rate can’t go up because the ballots weren’t rejected. If they were rejected they’d be set aside and counted as “rejected”, which means they’d have to be sent back out for fixing. But it’s too late to fix those ballots because the fixing has to take place prior to election day, which is why Pennsylvania and other states want absentee ballots processed long before the election. Since the ballots weren’t counted as “rejected”, we can be sure they were “accepted”.

          And we know election workers in Wisconsin were told to go ahead and fill out invalid ballots because they’ve told us so. That is illegal and should void the ballot, and they have provided testimony that they accepted all those invalid ballots after filling them out.

          And the media narrative is already shifting as they do “battle space prep”.

          The first narrative was “There is no evidence of election fraud!” That’s expiring.

          It’s shifting to “Maybe there is some evidence here and there, but it doesn’t PROVE election fraud.”

          After that everybody here will have to adopt the next talking point “Maybe there was some election fraud, but it wasn’t WIDESPREAD election fraud!”

          That will shift to “There may have been widespread election fraud, but it didn’t change the results of the election!”

          And then we’ll get to “There’s no evidence any party officials were involved in the election fraud!”

          It will be important for everyone to be cognizant of which stage we’re at, so as to argue that stage as well as it can be argued.Report

          • Em Carpenter in reply to George Turner says:

            Mmk George.Report

            • George Turner in reply to Em Carpenter says:

              Well, this will cheer you up.

              Breaking: Fox News ratings plummet.

              They’re now below CNN and MSNBC, for the first time in years.

              *laughs hysterically*

              They got woke, and went broke.

              If their heavily conservative viewers wanted to listen to partisan Democrat party propaganda, it’s simpler just to flip the channel and get it directly from partisan Democrats.

              They’d “installed” an election desk that were people who’d worked for Hillary, and the election desk put a big boot on the election coverage. What everybody assumes is going on is that the Democrat’s are executing their plan with stealing the election, and part of that is to get a Republican buy-in on the early election results, so that it won’t go to recounts. The way to do that was to have Fox News tell them it was over.

              The attempt failed spectacularly, because unlike Democrats, Republicans don’t necessarily swallow anything a media person on a TV tells them to swallow. In fact, we’re conditioned to parse it, examine, verify it, and dissect it, because most of it is lies.

              All the Fox viewers got irate about the blatant fraud and pitiful excuses for it, and at conservative sites everybody says they are totally done with Fox. Many are switching to Newsmax, even though Newsmax does more of a documentary format after business hours. Last night I told someone to try SkyNews, though we can only get SkyNews UK and not SkyNews Australia, which rocks.

              It’s pretty bad when I have to watch a news network halfway around the world to find out what’s going on in my own country, but that’s where we are now. It’s kind of like living behind the Iron Curtain, though the Internet censorship has more of a Chinese Communist Party flavor.

              So, if nothing else, Democrats have managed to destroy Fox News. 🙂Report

            • George Turner in reply to Em Carpenter says:

              Here you go EM.

              The text of Trump’s legal filing in Pennsylvania (PDF).

              Now we have more information. 🙂

              Among the injunctive relief being sought is “v. Plaintiff’s reasonable costs and expenses of this action, including attorneys’ fees; and cost;”Report

              • Mark from NJ in reply to George Turner says:

                …..and?Report

              • George Turner in reply to Mark from NJ says:

                v. means that not only is Trump going to overturn all the fraudulent results, he’s going to make Democrats pay for it.

                Bwuha…. Bwuhahahah!!!!

                I love this stuff. ^_^

                Biden is almost certain to lose in PA, GA, and AZ, and Michigan has started its own investigation into massive election fraud. The AG of Michigan is threatening criminal prosecution of a journalist for playing an audio of an election official teaching poll workers to throw away Republican ballots, etc. Multiple election workers have confirmed that they received those instructions.

                This is breaking to be the biggest election scandal in United States history.

                And like most criminal behavior, the obvious assumption is that they wouldn’t get caught, that it would all happen so fast that nobody would really look into it, or if caught, nobody would really do anything about it.

                US prisons are chock full of people who thought the same thing.Report

              • Mark from NJ in reply to George Turner says:

                Mmk George. I always loved when you explain lawyering to, y’know, actual lawyers. I see that hasn’t changed.

                Bye now.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Mark from NJ says:

                Yeah. My housemate, who is a retired trial lawyer, gets really irritated when he loses a legal argument with me. ^_^

                And it looks like Rock County Wisconsin also had a computer “glitch” that shifted their result to Biden by 19,032 votes. Why do those glitches always seem to happen the same direction? Biden’s “official” lead should drop to just 1,503 there, even before anybody gets into all the dead people who voted Biden, ballot spoilage, etc, which will shift tens of thousands more.

                Wisconsin will go into Trump’s win column.Report

              • Except Trump’s filing contradicts a lot of the garbage you’ve been slinging. Oops.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Michael Siegel says:

                George just likes to twist us up. He gets off on what he thinks is the sight of us getting all red faced and wasting time trying to prove him wrong.

                We all need to collectively stop. He won’t go away but it will cut down on the frivolous misdirection.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Philip H says:

                He is a living Gish GallopReport

            • Fish in reply to Em Carpenter says:

              “Mmk George” is the correct response.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Elections are a *LOT* better than they used to be. There were “irregularities” galore with the Kennedy election in 1960. (Heck, there were irregularities even as recently as Franken getting elected.)

    I am confident that the election was, within a few thousand votes here or there, more or less what the numbers show it as being.

    The problem is that there are going to be cheaters. There are always going to be cheaters. It’s like pointing out that there can’t be doping in bicycling because there are so many safeguards against doping. The best we can hope for is that the cheaters get caught and that we keep getting better at finding (and thereby preventing) new ways of cheating.Report

  4. But Stacey Abrams cheated by registering all those new voters. Also, counting ballots that arrive after election day is a crime. Ken Starr said so.Report

  5. Oscar Gordon says:

    I’m also getting tired of everyone who claims vote by mail isn’t secure, but who also fails to find any cases of mail in ballots being tampered with or fraudulent.Report

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    I find it hard to know whether the people who are screaming election fraud really believe in it or not. This is true at all levels. The media has already discovered and reported that the fine print in Trump’s calls for donations for a legal team allow half of the donation to go towards paying down is campaign debt. The debt is owed to the Trump Organization. Meaning, a lot of this could line Trump’s pockets and the long con continues. But what does that say for people not connected to the campaign?

    1. A lot of Republicans are still not sure about what a post-Trump universe looks like and whether they can push back against Trump without suffering too many adverse consequences;

    2. The whole calls from the usual suspects here are merely a manifestation of their views that no Democratic election or victory is legitimate. They do not believe that Democrats can be competitive outside of certain “anarchist cities.” So when a Democratic politician wins an unexpected election, especially a national one, the fraud most be obvious. It is really a psychological inability to recognize an election victory to Democrats. By maintaining this stance, it justifies hardball tactics against Democrats which could fray Democracy. This is the justification of high cost tactics and attacks.Report

  7. CJColucci says:

    Another remarkably sensible take. What’s going on here?Report

  8. Frank Eigler says:

    Asserting that there are only two ways to perform fraud requires a lot more argumentation than that.

    “fails to find any cases …”

    If the process logistics are such that fraud is easy, and there exist parties with motive/intent to use that opportunity, please don’t hold the burden of proof too high just to even start serious investigation.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Frank Eigler says:

      If the process logistics are such that fraud is easy…

      Explain how the logistics are such that it is easy. Don’t forget to explain how it can be done on sufficient scale to upset a national election without involving enough people to rapidly expand the probability to 1.0 that someone with convincing evidence of how the fraud was done will come forward.

      Be specific, I’m taking notes.Report

      • George Turner in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        How about dropping off a tranche of ballots that are thousands and thousands for Biden and 0 votes for Trump? How about shifting 6000 votes in a county of 23,000 and, when caught, blaming it on a “computer glitch”?

        How about later arriving votes, after wandering all through the US mail system, having a much different Trump/Biden ratio than votes that made it through the mail system faster? The mail system is not a gaseous diffusion plant. The “isotope ratio” of ballots shouldn’t be changing over time.

        And indeed, in the non-problem states, that ratio remains absolutely rock steady. A graph of it over time is a horizontal line. But in PA, MI, WI, GA, and AZ it sweeps upward towards Biden.

        graphs here.

        It is very easy to commit voter fraud, but it’s also very easy to spot it. The low-rent politicians committing this fraud apparently didn’t realize that, nor did they imagine they’d face the forces of weaponized autism that will never, ever keep digging.Report

        • And yet, in zero of at least 10 cases, Republicans have gone into federal court and didn’t say “thousands and thousands of votes” that they could actually point at. Only “Massive fraud must be happening. Somewhere. Somehow. Please stop counting and give us unrestricted access to disqualify ballots.”

          I live in a region of the country where the vote looks like it changes abruptly in states. In reality, the swing hinges on a steady trend in what the voters perceive as important that reaches a tipping point: water; fire; federal land mismanagement; Republican opposition to initiatives the voters favor like marijuana, minimum wage, independent redistricting. Arizona was entirely predictable.Report

        • Except you can’t do that with vote-by-mail because the code on the ballot has to match someone on the voter rolls and ti’s rejected if that person had already voted.

          Keep digging. I’m sure there’s a pony in there somewhere.Report

      • Frank Eigler in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        > Explain how the logistics are such that it is easy.

        Local fraud is easy. Take someone else’s ballot from a community mailbox. Harvest blank ballots and fill them in. Throw out R votes. etc. etc. etc. etc.

        > Don’t forget to explain how it can be done on sufficient scale to upset a national election

        That requires only a few hundred thousand ballots total.

        > without involving enough people to rapidly expand the probability to 1.0 that someone with convincing evidence of how the fraud was done will come forward.

        Now that’s moving goalposts. And note that there does not need to be a nationwide conspiracy, just a lot of people doing a little here and there.

        And some people have already come forward with affidavits about how -some- fraud was done, so that satisfies this crucial straw man tranche.

        > Be specific, I’m taking notes.

        Hope this helped.Report

        • Mark from NJ in reply to Frank Eigler says:

          “Only a few hundred thousand ballots.”

          All in one direction. Got it. We are done here.Report

          • Frank Eigler in reply to Mark from NJ says:

            depends on how clumsy / cocksure the fraudsters are

            smart ones would intermingle some for the other guyReport

            • Mark from NJ in reply to Frank Eigler says:

              I saw your comment on Twitter comparing me to OJ Simpson. You will not get anything further from me and I suggest an apology is in order.Report

            • George Turner in reply to Frank Eigler says:

              The problem with fraud like that is that you’re changing the “isotopic signature” by skewing the ballots. It still shows up as an irregularity. You have to fully mix all the ballots so everything is equally contaminated, because if you don’t, you have batches of contaminated and uncontaminated ballots that will show a definite statistical fingerprint.

              Such really obvious indicators are showing in all the late ballot batches in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.

              Minnesota looks as clean as a whistle in that regard, but Minnesota’s voter turnout numbers are insane, similar to the turnout in a few Georgia counties or Philly or Chicago precincts.

              Some of the turnout figures top 200%.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Frank Eigler says:

          How would one “harvest” ballots with tracking data on them? Are they going out and stealing them from mailboxes at the end of driveways? Grabbing them at the post office? I always hear about this harvesting, but never an explanation of how it work.Report

  9. Burt Likko says:

    What easier method do you propose exists? Electronic manipulation of reported totals, leaving intact records of the honest vote available to manually cross-check against the altered total? Do you imagine that there is no safeguard against such a thing?

    If you posit such a manipulation (or more accurately, a *set* of manipulations, using different hacking techniques in different states because they use different equipment, software, and methods) has taken place, you still have to deal with the fact that whoever did the hacking did it incompletely, leaving Democrats to suffer reverses in Congress despite winning the Presidency. In other words, that the cheaters chose to cheat incompletely.

    It’s too implausible to credit.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Burt Likko says:

      This looks misthreaded – my comment was intended to reply to @Frank_Eigler above.Report

      • I think this is the same threading mistake that I make regularly — when you’re responding to the comment that appears last on the page, and it’s at the outermost level, it’s easy to forget to hit the “Reply” link. Add it to my lengthy list of WordPress questions. Is there an easy way to get a prompt like “This will be a top-level comment; is that what you intended?”Report

  10. Michael Cain says:

    What easier method do you propose exists? Electronic manipulation of reported totals, leaving intact records of the honest vote available to manually cross-check against the altered total? Do you imagine that there is no safeguard against such a thing?

    Yep. Can’t say about other states, but in mine, they track and audit the snot out of the process. I won’t say that creating 100,000 fraudulent votes is impossible, but it would be extremely difficult to do without the audit system catching it pretty quickly.

    (Damn. Misthreaded again.)Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

      I agree with this. I like the way that Colorado does it. I feel like my vote was secure, counted, and that there isn’t a good/easy way to stuff a ballot box.

      Well, other than importing millions of Californians.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

        Well, other than importing millions of Californians.

        Wouldn’t the proper phrasing for that be “invaded by millions of Californians”?

        I thought I saw a lot of California plates when I lived in Arvada (one of the west Denver suburbs). Now that I live in Fort Collins, I see even more of them. Not to mention the real estate prices, driven to some extent by people moving from California. We are almost done selling our old house for an obscene amount of money, and have purchased a new somewhat smaller house for an only slightly less obscene amount.Report

  11. greginak says:

    So Veep/Covid Task Force Fearless Leader Pence is going on vacation in Florida.

    Two take aways:

    1 The admin knows they lost and all the posturing is to grift money for themselves. Trump may still be in massive ego failure panic though.

    2 They never gave a crap about doing anything about Covid other then PR to make themselves look good and they sure as hell aren’t going to start caring now. Cases rising, Pence is going to disneyworld.Report

  12. Philip H says:

    You ought to know your Party has jumped the shark when two of your senators tell a Secretary of State in tehri state to resign because he has the temerity to count all legal ballots and it puts both of them in a run-off. As opposed to , ya know, trying to figure out why your particular message no longer resonates with a majority of voters in your state (who, hint, don’t look like you)Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Philip H says:

      To be fair, you’ve also jumped the shark if you look at electoral losses and blame a single stereotypical trait for the loss (like, say, oh, racism) for those losses, rather than failing to find a message that resonates.Report

      • North in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        True, but to be fully fair it might bear noting that the former behavior is behavior by actual party candidates up to the elected President belonging to said party while the latter behavior is behavior largly consisting bloviating by a bunch of people online or in the media.

        And let us note that by this time in 2016 Hillary Clinton, the Devil’s Governess, had conceded the election and the incumbent President, Barrack Hussein Obama (closet muslim and the devil himself), had congratulated the President Elect Trump on his victory and invited him to the White House.Report

        • Pinky in reply to North says:

          This might be a tangent, but should we be using Clinton as our standard for conceding? Because like every public appearance since then she’s been trying to take it back. She’s been worse than Gore in that regard. You’d have to go back to Nixon post-1960 to find a worse loser, if that.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        Agreed Oscar.Report

  13. Pinky says:

    I don’t believe in conspiracy, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility of congruity. A thousand people all on the same page don’t actually need a page to be handed out. They’re just all going to do a little more than is strictly legal out of a misguided sense of patriotism. I mean, we’re told every day about unconscious biases and institutional corruption, right? I’d hope that the right checks are in place to keep it from happening, and I’m not going to assume it’s happened, but I’ll watch where the actual, real evidence leads.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

      If ballots were simply printed pieces of paper that I could Xerox and fill out, then it’s easy to pull off.

      But they aren’t.Report

      • George Turner in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        In some state, such as mine, they are. I think our only requirement is that county clerks use pretty good quality paper. They probably have them printed at Fed Ex/Kinkos. Sometimes you can tell that the toner was running low.Report

        • I may be misremembering, but I believe for federal elections at least, there are requirements for the paper and printing that include weight, opacity, contrast, alignment, etc. They’re within reach of some local print shops, but not all.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

          Do they have tracking numbers?

          I mean, what is one of the easiest way for Treasury to ID counterfeit bills? That stack of $100’s all have the same serial number, or non-conforming numbers, etc.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Pinky says:

      But why would there only be 1000 people on one page? Wouldn’t there be some number on the other page?Report

  14. I say this only for the purpose of discussion and not to claim that Biden somehow “stole” the election. But I can see another type of voter fraud that’s not as massive as what Mark describes but could sway a state in one direction or another, especially in very close races.

    I’m thinking of the stereotypical machine-controlled localities, of the sort that predominated in the early 20th century and was still around, in some places, in the 1960s and 1970s. The elections under those machines weren’t always or necessarily fraud-making affairs. But they could be, and they’d be something in between retail fraud and wholesale fraud. It wouldn’t be that the locality the machine controlled would somehow be in cahoots for a national effort to unseat a presidential candidate. Instead, it would be the machine doing what it does to advance its party and sometimes marshaling enough votes to tip the balance in the state. Those shenanigans could shade into something that’s like a violation of election law that might result in ballots being discounted.

    I want to repeat, I don’t think this happened in 2020. Or if it did, I have no knowledge of it. (Not that I would, but I want to be clear: I’m not claiming any knowledge one way or the other.)

    ETA: In case it isn’t clear: I believe Biden won the election legitimately.Report